Spain Confirms One Passenger Tested Positive for Hantavirus

(MENAFN) Spain's health authorities confirmed Monday that one Spanish passenger aboard the MV Hondius cruise ship has tested positive for hantavirus — a disclosure that came just as officials wrapped up a sweeping two-day evacuation of everyone on board.

Health Minister Monica Garcia announced via social media that the infected passenger is currently showing no symptoms, while the remaining 13 Spanish nationals on the vessel all returned negative results. All 14 are being held under quarantine at a military hospital in Madrid.

The outbreak has now claimed three lives, with additional confirmed cases emerging across multiple nationalities — among them an American national and a French woman, both of whom were airlifted to Spain's Canary Islands on Sunday. The French woman has been admitted to intensive care but is reported to be in a stable condition, according to French Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu, who provided an update Monday evening.

Speaking at a Monday evening press conference, Garcia declared the evacuation mission "accomplished," confirming that 125 passengers and crew members representing 23 nations had been successfully disembarked over the course of two days. Those evacuated have either returned to their home countries or are currently in transit.

The MV Hondius is now en route to the Netherlands, where the remaining crew will disembark and the ship will undergo full decontamination.

The operation has not been without controversy. The president of the Canary Islands publicly questioned the health implications of routing the evacuation through the archipelago, raising concerns over why the Netherlands — the ship's country of registration — was not chosen as the primary disembarkation point. Health officials, however, pushed back firmly, emphasizing that hantavirus transmission is far less contagious than COVID-19 and does not carry a comparable pandemic risk.

The multinational response was coordinated in collaboration with the World Health Organization and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control.

Investigators have identified the strain at the center of the outbreak as the Andes variant — the only known form of hantavirus documented to spread directly between humans. The virus's most catastrophic recorded outbreak unfolded in Patagonia, southern Argentina, in 2018, when 11 people lost their lives.

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